About Informed Consent

IC was started during the Christmas holidays of 1997, and has gone through
several stages of evolution over the years. It began with listings of
websites, events and shops, but also had a thread
of activism, as reflected in the name which stresses the consensual and
legitimate nature of what we do. Even publishing BDSM listings was part of
that activism in those days, as it was created when publications like Time
Out and the Guardian refused to take BDSM ads, and it was genuinely hard to
find people, shops, and events.
In 1999 it became a free membership site with user-generated listings
and blogs, and in 2005 social networking features, pictures, and web boards
were added.

During this time it became the largest UK BDSM website, with hundreds of
thousands of members and 10,000 unique visitors per day. Countless real-life
events were started following discussions on its web boards. Thousands of
relationships were started between people who first contacted each other
after discussion threads or personal ads. Some of these relationships
even produced IC babies :)

But now (2013) we're in a world where daytime TV talks about "Fifty Shades of
Grey", and sites like Facebook, FetLife, Twitter, Pinterest, and Wordpress
make it easy for people to network and to talk about their BDSM ideas, or
their business, or their event. In March 2013 Informed Consent was refocused
on to its core activism aims, and moved from informedconsent.co.uk to
a much simpler news blog format at www.informedconsent.org.uk, which also
hosts the archives of the boards, groups, and blogs
from 2000 to 2013.